Back in the Saddle

It has been a while since I blogged, almost three months. So what have I been up to – well actually quite a bit. I have left the WinFS client API team and moved back to my old group (formally the WebData team) now called Dataworks. To make a long story short, they needed some last minute work done for Yukon that was along the same lines of some of the Xml to relational stuff I did with the SqlXml team. Basically developing an ADO.net DataReader (“XmlDataReader) for Xml sources. (More on that topic at a later date).

It is a tight schedule with some interesting challenges – but it is invigorating again to be designing/ developing something near-term and with a solid vision. Feels a lot like those ObjectSpaces’ days last fall/ winter. Keeping busy with good challenges keeps me out of trouble.

Long term I will be working on XmlDataReader and the ADO.net DataSet going for the Orcas release of Whidbey.

This job change is probably going to slightly affect the topics of my Blog, but I still hope to discuss O/R mapping topics. Despite not working actively on O/R stuff the last few months, I have spent some time looking at what our competitors are doing – and generally what is going on in this space. That has given me a few ideas of how the current ADO.net stack could be used to implement some of the O/R functionality that ObjectSpaces had. I hope to post some blogs about this near term and maybe get a MSDN article written this winter some time. I also have been doing quite a bit of reading about the “light weight container” movement in the Java world and have some questions about that approach wrt O/R Mappping solutions and application development in general. This approach is quite different in a lot of ways to how we do things with the .net frameworks – so I have some open questions that have been puzzling me on this topic.

I also hope to discuss some of the DataSet improvements for Whidbey. Up till a few weeks ago, I was not aware of the significant improvements that they have made for Whidbey – particularly in regards to performance. I will leave specifics until later,

Same non-technical minutia will remain… plus I am quite steamed that Owen Wilson wasn’t invited back for “Meet the Fockers”.

Oh… and since I have been working closely with XSD lately – I have decided to revive my 10 “favorite” XSD gripes list, but with a holiday theme.